that only art touched. Art seemed to her to have become a person. A man. A Mann man. Redheaded. She said, âArtâs touch is cold.â She didnât know why she said that. It wasnât what she believed.
Nobody answered her.
It became important to her to get a response, so she said, âItâs like a crematorium that hasnât been used in twenty years, if you want to know the truth. Artâs touch.â
Still nobody said anything, but she wouldnât let it drop. âWhat I mean is,â she said, âart is a kind of stony vault in which the ashes of our ancestors are housed. Even physicistsâ ashes. Even the ashes of dead dictators.â
The Berliner capitulated. âEven that is to make of art a utility,â he said, âlike the water service or electric power. My wife says, there is an artist named Paul Jenkins, who has publicly consumed a canvas of pears, to illustrate that pears are for eating, not painting.â
And at that, Gus and Norman glanced shyly at each other and fell in love all over again. They were on the same side after all! Augusta asked the Berliner, âWhat did they taste like?ââmeaning the pears. And Norman said, âIf you ask me, thatâs an extremely untrustworthy teleology.â
The man seemed offended. âWhat do you mean?â he asked. âWhat teleology?â
âLook,â Gus said, leaning over the table animatedly; her hair, grazing the table top, was so blond it hurt Normanâs eyes. âSuppose a pearâs most salient characteristic, the one that juts out from the others, is its shape. After all, I defy you to describe how a pear tastes; isnât it a bland taste, like gritty pudding? And consider the shape of the pear, how it glows , a mock light bulb. Maybe pears were meant for mock lamps. Youâll say, What do I want with a mock lamp? But thatâs a whole different problem, to wit, our supply of mock lamps exceeds the demand for them!â Her eyes glittered, reflecting the incredible dark yellow of her hair, and on her finger the lustrous pearl gleamed, like a third, anomalous eye. Now when she turned toward Norman, he felt charged by her energy, and they left hand in hand, in good spirits, victorious.
7
N ORMAN HAD TO BREAK the news to his father. He did not look forward to doing this. Well, part of him looked forward to it.
He took the subway to Brooklyn and went straight to the old manâs office. The way he had it figured, it was wiser to tell his father personally in private; his mother would go along with anything. His motherâs philosophy was, Never complain because itâs all free anyway. âItâ was life. His fatherâs was, Nothing is freeâthey take it out of your hide every day and the best you can hope for is a decent return on your investment. This argument had been going on for the whole of Normanâs time on earth, which now totaled twenty-eight years.
Waiting in the anteroom, Norman smoked a cigarette, taking exaggerated drags to keep his throat from locking. He cracked his knuckles. There was no window in the waiting room but otherwise it was posh: paisley pillows and rubber plants, plenty of walnut paneling. Jocelynâs IBM typewriter looked like the computer bank on Star Trek .
The luxury didnât hide the odor of hard work. The toil was there, even if it was neatly filed away in steel cabinets. In a way, Norman thought it was obscene of his father to go on working at his age; a man that old was a fool to lust after the law. By the time Jocelyn let him in, Norman was furious, but he could follow the line of his fury back to the Talmud, and he knew better than to blame his father for the sins of his fathers. For all those generations, law had been the truly beloved, embraced warmly like the Simchath Torah. Understanding inhibited him. Tolerantly, he said to his father, âYouâre looking fit.â It was like starting an